How Local Citizens Can Take up the Fight Against Public Corruption

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We hear it all the time from politicians: They are finally going to stop the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government.

In states with more corruption, like Pennsylvania, New York, or Illinois, calls to clean up government are frequent as well.

The problem is that these promises rarely come to fruition.

This week—Sunshine Week—is a perfect time to stop waiting for someone else to fix these problems. Let’s look to citizens, and a push for more open government, to get the job done. As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant of all.

New York might be the epitome of a state where corruption and abuse have run wild. Politicians here have long failed to live up to their promises to fix things.

The New York Legislature and governor have passed “ethics reforms” year after year of late, yet New York remains one of the most corrupt states in the nation. According to a University of Missouri study, New York has been home to the most corrupt officials in the U.S. over the past decade or so.

Waste and favor-trading is part of this culture of corruption, and it goes right down to the local level. On Long Island, one town official in Oyster Bay was convicted of tax fraud surrounding a scheme where he secretly guided taxpayer-backed contracts to a paving company, where he also worked.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

That’s why Reclaim New York is engaging residents to fight the problem through the New York Transparency Project. This is a model that citizens across the country can benefit from.

The latest effort from this project is an innovative new citizen-driven online transparency platform, released this week to celebrate Sunshine Week.

It gives citizens the power to grade the performance of local governments and officials on 29 clear transparency practices. The extensive website covers 2,300 county, city, town, school district, and village governments.

As locals use the new site to rate how accessible governments are, elected officials who are interested in transparency will have a prime opportunity to step up and lead.

The process will also raise red flags when governments refuse to provide information. There’s something wrong when officials won’t show you how your money is being spent.

That’s something every American should know. We should all know when our government is meeting, what contracts it is signing, and how it is budgeting taxpayer dollars.

These are not revolutionary questions, but a citizen-driven effort to demand they are answered at every level of government definitely is.

The new online transparency platform is an important tool allowing citizens to demand proactive transparency. But, to reach that point, people must force government out of the shadows. That means using the law to make sure that public records are not hidden.

Reclaim New York was able to do this using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The law does not just give citizens access to public records—it establishes timelines so that those citizens can obtain the records they seek in a timely manner.

But that has not stopped some towns and villages from dragging their feet.

When Reclaim New York filed records requests with over 500 local governments to show how every taxpayer dollar was being spent, scores of them pushed back—around 20 percent total.

But Reclaim New York filed—and won—lawsuits where necessary, and it has been successful in making this information public in its online database.

These cases also added to legal precedent that people should be reimbursed in cases of unreasonable denial, rather than be stuck paying thousands of dollars to see a public record.

Laws may be different throughout the country, but the principle is the same. Bad actors need to be shown that the days of hiding information from the public are over.

Additionally, where perhaps a local clerk is ignorant of the law, more education needs to be provided. To that end, Reclaim New York is conducting civic training sessions to help fix the capacity problem.

In the end, the solution for governments that have failed to provide records for any reason is the same: Be proactively transparent. Governments can’t run, and they can’t hide. With active and determined citizens, sunshine is the inevitable outcome.

That’s how we change the environment from one where government officials have too often failed to take their responsibility to taxpayers seriously, to one where proactive transparency is expected.

With access to better information, citizens can be the watchdogs we clearly need. People in states that have endured legacies of waste, favor-trading, and corruption should look to this approach.

No American should have to wonder if their hard-earned tax dollar is going to a road, or an insider’s slush fund. Sunshine Week is the perfect time to do something about it and restore ownership to citizens at every level of government. (For more from the author of “How Local Citizens Can Take up the Fight Against Public Corruption” please click HERE)

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New Planned Parenthood Ad Campaign Seeks to Defend Abortion Giant’s Government Funding

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After spending over $30 million on the 2016 election, Planned Parenthood has a new project: a million-dollar ad campaign defending its government funding.

The organization, which receives over half a billion dollars from taxpayers each year, stands to lose a significant portion of its government funding should Congress pass a reconciliation bill that includes the House Energy and Commerce Committee language making Planned Parenthood affiliates ineligible for receiving Medicaid reimbursements for one year after the enactment of the bill.

Desperate to keep the tax dollars flowing, Planned Parenthood’s latest campaign will reportedly highlight the abortion giant’s “cancer screening and prevention services,” as they are referred to in the group’s annual reports, which, according to Planned Parenthood’s own numbers, have decreased by 57 percent since 2010.

It’s not surprising that Planned Parenthood intends to highlight cancer-related services rather than its abortion activity. But policymakers should keep several important facts in mind during the debate surrounding tax dollars and entanglement with the abortion industry.

The most recent annual report for 2014-2015 shows that 94 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy resolution services were abortions and less than 1 percent were adoption referrals. In the same year, Planned Parenthood performed 323,999 abortions. Over the course of the last three reported years, Planned Parenthood has performed almost 1 million abortions.

Meanwhile, annual reports in recent years show that Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive services have dropped. STD and STI prevention and treatment services have dropped. Total services have dropped. And, importantly, cancer screening and prevention services have dropped.

LiveAction highlights that Planned Parenthood “only does 0.97 percent of Pap smears and 1.8 percent of breast exams” in the U.S. Planned Parenthood provides zero mammograms, despite often repeated claims to the contrary.

It’s also worth noting that the most recent data available about Planned Parenthood’s activity comes from the 2014-2015 annual report, which was released in December 2015. As previously discussed here at The Daily Signal, these annual reports are typically published in December or January, so the latest report addressing 2015-2016 was expected to be available by now.

But it’s nowhere to be found, and requests from The Daily Signal to Planned Parenthood’s press team have gone unanswered.

How many cancer screening and prevention services did Planned Parenthood provide during the most recent reporting year? How many unique patients were served? How many abortions were performed?

Planned Parenthood isn’t saying, but is going to great lengths to keep the tax dollars flowing in the meantime. (For more from the author of “New Planned Parenthood Ad Campaign Seeks to Defend Abortion Giant’s Government Funding” please click HERE)

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Jihadis Using Religious Visa to Enter US, Experts Warn

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A U.S. visa program designed to temporarily admit religious workers from other countries may be letting jihadists into the country, security experts and religious leaders warn.

The R visa program is for non-immigrant clerics and religious workers and allows successful applicants to stay in the U.S. for up to five years. They are then allowed to apply for a permanent residency under their R-1 status.

But some critics say the visa raises red flags and has long been abused by leaders with extreme views.

“People have come in and tried to come in with this visa to preach their hardline and dangerous views, and then encourage [the] vulnerable to travel back with them where they are further brainwashed and can potentially be used to harm the USA,” Adnan Khan, former president of the Council of Pakistan American Affairs, told Fox News. “The solution isn’t banning innocent Muslims and migration, but looking at visas like this one which have raised red flags and caused trouble in the past.”

Khan also said several letters have been written to federal agencies over the past four years concerning the R program, but they have failed to get a response. (Read more from “Jihadis Using Religious Visa to Enter US, Experts Warn” HERE)

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Rod Perry: Still Crazy After All These Years

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Adventure has been a way of life for Rod Perry of Chugiak, Alaska. Now seventy-four, an age when most are slowing way down if not sitting still, Rod has caught another gear and is speeding up.

Perry grew up in Oceanside, Oregon. With the surf pounding out his front door and thousand-year-old forests in back, and with a winter population of just 175 in the 1950s, the little village provided an idyllic setting for an outdoors-crazy kid like Rod to develop. Learning of woods lore was greatly enhanced by a father who never wore a pair of shoes until age twelve, only Sarcee moccasins, having grown up on a homestead and trapline in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies where his father’s hunting and trapping partners were of that First Nations people.

Rod attended Tillamook, Oregon schools, then Oregon State University. In 1967, with a wildlife management degree in his pocket, he put Oregon in his rear-view mirror and headed for Alaska. “Where else could I have gone for my kind of self-expression?” reflects Perry. “Had I stayed out in America (as he calls the contiguous states) my life would have been dull as dishwater. God didn’t wire me that way.”

Through the years his employments have included work on a moose research project, guiding big game hunters, and operating his commercial fishing boat in the high-risk, high reward waters of Bristol Bay, the world’s richest salmon fishery.

Rod conceived and filmed the iconic Alaska motion picture classic, ‘Sourdough,’ starring his late father, Gil Perry. With son rolling film, dad played an aged trapper and prospector attempting to live out a disappearing lifestyle amidst a dying old-time Alaska. Perhaps no other motion picture which toured the world’s theaters ever started with less. Gil had never acted, Rod had never produced a film, and they began with barely two nickels to rub together. Never hesitant to go where only fools dare to tread, Rod dove headlong into the several-year-long project without a hint of filmmaking experience. In its place was a humble confidence in his God-given artistic sense and a feel for how to craft a magnetically romantic tale of the Old North.

A rough draft version toured Alaska to record-breaking crowds and was shown in Rod’s former Oregon hometown. Then Hollywood’s Albert S. Ruddy (‘The Godfather,’ ‘The Longest Yard,’ many others) engineered the final edit. Since 1977 ‘Sourdough’ has quite likely been seen by more theater goers, TV audiences, and home video watchers than any film ever made in Alaska.

Rod Perry once rode a wild moose, and he has weathered several close shaves with charging grizzlies. But he waves those off as topics unworthy of more than passing mention. What he really likes to recount are his wild adventures by dog team. He has freighted sled loads of supplies for climbers up onto the flanks of Denali. A memorable trip took him to visit Eskimo friends. Mushing north around the frozen shores of the Bering and Chukchi Seas, he stayed a day or two in each little village. On the way, from one high overlook at the tip of the Seward Peninsula, he could see the coast of Siberia across the Bering Straits. The trip ended far above the Arctic Circle.

His most daring trek was to bring twenty-two sled dogs out to the highway system from the remote cabin where he had been living. It would have cost the lives of the small group Perry led if they failed to make it through before their almost thousand pounds of dog and human food ran out.

“Once we traveled beyond a point of no return,” recalls Rod, “it was make it all the way through or die. Out there in that vast trackless country between Mount Denali and the Yukon River there was no trail; we had to make our own. If we had fallen, no one would have known where the wolves and ravens picked our bones.

“It was about 175 grueling miles to the highway system, route-finding by map and compass, cutting our way by axe and bow saw, and breaking trail by snowshoe in front of the dogs. Camps far below zero were made each night wherever darkness overtook us. Only two pieces of canvas comprised our shelter, but that’s enough if you know how.

“We reached the highway the morning of the eighteenth day. Our food had run out the night before.”

Almost eight hundred individuals have completed Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Of their number, those who have taken such a lengthy wilderness trip as Rod’s, and have done it on their own outside of an organized race structure where trail and supplies are established, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

And so Rod was drawn like a moth to a flame to test drive what would go on to be known the world over as “The Last Great Race on Earth.”

“Recalling the moment I first learned of plans to stage such a stupendous thing as the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end,” says Rod. “I almost levitated. I could no more turn away from being among the intrepid band that pioneered it than turn down my next breath.

“It was an incredible departure from the standard sled dog racing model of short dashes over manicured trails near towns and villages. The plan was so audacious few thought it could be brought off. According to common opinion, for us to plunge headlong by dog team into a thousand-mile crossing of wild Alaska, in the dead of an arctic winter, was sure proof we were fools.”

With virtually zero belief on the streets in what sounded like a cockamamie goat-rope of an impossible dream, race founder Joe Redington and his few true believers found it impossible to raise adequate funding. But funded or not they were determined to go. With logistical help thin, emergency help non-existent, and organization barely enough to hold things together, Joe needed a seasoned field of veteran bush travelers used to going it alone in Alaska’s winter wilderness. And that’s exactly who came to the starting line—gold prospectors, trappers, big game guides, homesteaders, bush pilots, and, most notably, the final trailing edge of Alaska’s great (pre-snowmachine) Native dog men. Since that first race in 1973, no field of their likes has ever been assembled to run the Iditarod.

“Had we failed, we would have only proven the skeptics correct, erasing the thin amount of credibility we had. That would have made it impossible for even the slight funding Joe had scraped up to be gathered for a second try,” says Perry, “and the event would have died right there.”

But those hard-to-kill trailsmen, with Iditarod’s very future riding precariously on their shoulders, did not fail. From their glorious success the race would grow to become Alaska’s most world-famous annual event. And although that trailblazing first run through to Nome would go down as the greatest Iditarod adventure of all time, no telling solely about their wild and crazy, sometimes bizarre passage has ever found its way to the screen.

A few years back, Rod was gripped by what a shame it is that the chance to tell the story in that powerful, ‘I was there, I did it’ dynamic is dying as one after the other of Iditarod’s original mushers slip away. With only a dozen of the original entrants left, Rod became more and more driven to do something about preserving the tale.

Rod thought, “What are the chances that one of the elite group of first Iditaroders would be an author (‘TRAILBREAKERS—Pioneering Alaska’s Iditarod,’ available at www.rodperry.com) and a veteran filmmaker? And then what are the odds that an Academy Award nominated filmmaker, Buzz Rohlfing, would walk up out of the blue and suggest we collaborate on a First Iditarod film? God must be tapping me on the shoulder.”

Now Rod Perry has plunged headlong into filming, with Buzz Rohlfing, ‘TRAILBREAKERS—The Men of Seventy-Three.’

“It’s gonna blow people away!” exclaims Perry, excitement in his voice and glinting from his eyes. “That first race was so one-of-a-kind, there’s the 1973 Iditarod, and then there are the other forty-four. I’ve chuckled that it was about as foreign-sounding to today’s racers and as distant from today’s race as if it was the tale of Jason and the Argonauts’ voyage in quest of the Golden Fleece!”

There was very little media coverage of that first race, because there was so much skepticism that the 1973 event could be brought off. Once many of the racers returned to their remote homes and villages, most of their stories never saw print, much less the screen. But down through the decades, the hints and whispers that have seeped out from the backwoodsmen who ran it have clothed that incredible odyssey with an alluring aura of rich fables and untold mystery, tantalizingly dangling just beyond reach.

_______________________________________

Perry and Rohlfing say production information is up on their brand new website www.menof73.com Soon informative articles interesting to race fans will be posted there. Those who heed Rod Perry’s call to jump on his runners and ride along on the filming adventure are in for a wild, educational ride into Iditarod’s glorious, untold past.

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Menstruating Men and the Latest Examples of Transanity

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Have you heard about Toni the Tampon who teaches children that men can get periods too? Or about the mother and son who are about to become father and daughter? What about the transgender pastor who teaches that God is transgender?

This morning, as I was planning to write this very article, I received three emails from three different friends in three different parts of the country, all with links to different news headlines on major news websites, all with one theme in common: radical transgender activism. In fact, the links were to the three stories I mentioned here. My reply to each person was the same: This will be included in my latest article!

Transanity at Our Door

You see, this is something knocking at our doors, not something we went looking for. This is something being reported in the NY Post and the Daily Mail, which are major news outlets, albeit with a touch of sensationalism. This is what our kids are dealing with in their schools, what’s coming their way (and ours) via Hollywood, what’s being debated from the White House down to the local courthouse.

That’s why I address these issues, and that’s why I’ll continue to sound the wake-up call to our nation: There is an all-out war on sexual difference (often referred to as “gender”), and if it wins the day, it will lead to societal chaos.

But first, my standard caveat. We’re not just dealing with issues, we’re dealing with people. Some of them have biological or chromosomal abnormalities and are classified as intersex, and do not fit conveniently into our simple male or female boxes. We should treat them with compassion and respect, helping them find wholeness, just as we would treat anyone else with a physical handicap or defect.

Others – perhaps the larger number and the more vocal – are not intersex and simply suffer from gender identity confusion (now called gender dysphoria, primarily due to political pressure put on the APA by transgender activists). They too deserve our compassion (who can imagine the pain they have lived with?), but compassion calls us to dig deeper and helps us get to the root cause of their struggles, with the goal being transformation from the inside out (rather than from the outside in).

So, I do not write to mock or to degrade others in their struggle. I write to say (in loud, bold terms): God has a better way!

Five Recent Examples of Transanity

Here, then, are 5 recent examples of transanity.

1) Dr. Susan Berry reports, “The author of a children’s coloring book has invented a character named ‘Toni the Tampon’ to instruct children that men can menstruate.

“Cass Clemmer, the author of The Adventures of Toni the Tampon, has been using her coloring book character to ‘destigmatize’ menstruation. Now, however, she also wants to ‘de-gender’ the female biological process and to persuade children that men get periods too.”

Note to Cass: Men do not get periods, because menstruation is the result of ovulation, when the ovaries release an egg for fertilization. As explained by the Mayo Clinic, “If ovulation takes place and the egg isn’t fertilized, the lining of the uterus sheds through the vagina. This is a menstrual period.”

Fact: A man doesn’t have a uterus or a vagina or ovaries or eggs, which is why men can’t menstruate. Toni the Tampon is hereby corrected!

And sorry, Toni, but saying that a woman (especially one who still has her female organs intact and still menstruates) who identifies as a man is now a man is like saying that a woman who dresses up as her team’s tiger mascot is actually a tiger. Not so!

2) An article on LGBTQ Nation announces, “Father & daughter both come out as transgender, will transition together.” So, this is about a man and his daughter who now want to become a woman and a boy, right? Not at all. It’s about a mother and her son who want to become a man and a girl, yet the article refers to them as “father and daughter.”

On the one hand, I would encourage Christian conservatives to read this article, since it forces us to look at people and not just issues, and it’s hard not to feel pain for these two as they share their stories.

It’s not like they’re perverted sinners engaging in all kinds of horrific acts. Rather, they both have struggled deeply with their gender identity, with the mother saying, “When I was younger I used to wish for cancer so I would have to get a mastectomy.”

But compassion would say, “Let’s find out why you have struggled so deeply with a being a woman,” (and to the son, “Let’s find out why you have struggled so deeply with a being a boy”). In contrast, confusion says, “The woman has become this child’s father because she no longer identifies as a woman, and the son has become her daughter because he no longer identifies as a boy.”

May God help this family.

3) The Christian Post reports that a transgender pastor who opposes Texas’s bathroom bill teaches that “God is transgender.”

This pastor argues, “In the beginning, God created humankind in God’s image. … So God is transgender. We’re all created in the image of what is holy and divine and sacred, and we should all be treated that way.”

I addressed this deeply mistaken notion last year in my article, “A Rabbi Claims That God Is Transgender.” But in short, Genesis 1 does not teach that God is transgender (because He creates human beings in His image, male and female), any more than it teaches that God has sexual body parts or that He physically procreates.

Rather, it teaches that the fullness of male and female distinctives are found in Him, which does not mean that God is not transgender. Rather, it means that He transcends gender. And so, while male pronouns are used to describe and refer to Him, and while He is called the heavenly Father (not Mother), He can be likened to a compassionate mother, because, as stated, as an eternal Spirit, He transcends gender categories.

More importantly – really, much more importantly when it comes to the bathroom controversies – in the beginning He created us as male and female and called us to procreate (“Be fruitful and multiply”), which only a distinct male and a distinct female can do. There is no ambiguity here, nor is there ambiguity regarding male and female distinctives throughout the entire Bible.

4) Over at College Fix, we learn that “U. Minnesota drops homecoming ‘King and Queen’ — replaces with genderless ‘Royals’.”

Yes, “The University of Minnesota has become the latest university to do away with the traditional Homecoming King and Queen titles and replace them with the gender-neutral ‘Royals’ term.

“Taking it one step further, University of Minnesota officials also point out that the winners don’t even have to be one biological male and one biological female, stating on its website: ‘“Royals”… can be any combination of any gender identity.”

This kind of cultural insanity is so absurd that simply repeating these words is enough to expose the madness.

But there’s more: “Campus officials called the change a move ‘toward gender inclusivity’ that promotes ‘a spirit of inclusion at the University of Minnesota.’”

This is not “a spirit of inclusion”; this is a spirit of confusion.

5) Finally, an article on Vice tells the story of “The Trans Women Who Become Lesbians After Years as Gay Men.” (The article, which contains offensive language, actually celebrates this, noting, “There aren’t many people who are fortunate enough to have lived their lives first as gay men and later as lesbian women.”)

So, this is the story of biological men, who then identified as women, but who discovered they were attracted to women, and who now identify as lesbians.

The better course of action would have been to identify as biological males (which they are) who are attracted to women, as the vast majority of biological males are. But no. These biological males who have normal attractions to women now identify as lesbians.

This is why these examples of “transanity,” and this is why I will continue to raise my voice. The madness must stop. God has a better way. (For more from the author of “Menstruating Men and the Latest Examples of Transanity” please click HERE)

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D.C. Circuit Court Issues Dangerous Decision for Cybersecurity

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The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today held that foreign governments are free to spy on, injure, or even kill Americans in their own homes–so long as they do so by remote control. The decision comes in a case called Kidane v. Ethiopia, which we filed in February 2014.

Our client, who goes by the pseudonym Mr. Kidane, is a U.S. citizen who was born in Ethiopia and has lived here for over 30 years. In 2012 through 2013, his family home computer was attacked by malware that captured and then sent his every keystroke and Skype call to a server controlled by the Ethiopian government, likely in response to his political activity in favor of democratic reforms in Ethiopia. In a stunningly dangerous decision today, the D.C. Circuit ruled that Mr. Kidane had no legal remedy against Ethiopia for this attack, despite the fact that he was wiretapped at home in Maryland. The court held that, because the Ethiopian government hatched its plan in Ethiopia and its agents launched the attack that occurred in Maryland from outside the U.S., a law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) prevented U.S. courts from even hearing the case.

The decision is extremely dangerous for cybersecurity. Under it, you have no recourse under law if a foreign government that hacks into your car and drives it off the road, targets you for a drone strike, or even sends a virus to your pacemaker, as long as the government planned the attack on foreign soil. It flies in the face of the idea that Americans should always be safe in their homes, and that safety should continue even if they speak out against foreign government activity abroad.

Factual background

Mr. Kidane discovered traces of state-sponsored malware called FinSpy, a sophisticated spyware product which its maker claims is sold exclusively to governments and law enforcement, on his laptop at his home in suburban Maryland. A forensic examination of his computer showed that the Ethiopian government had been recording Mr. Kidane’s Skype calls, as well as monitoring his (and his family’s) web and email usage. The spyware was launched when Kidane opened an attachment in an email. The spying began at his home in Maryland.

The spyware then reported everything it captured back to a command and control server in Ethiopia, owned and controlled by the Ethiopian government. The infection was active from October 2012 through March 2013, and was stopped just days after researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab released a report exposing Ethiopia’s use of FinSpy. The report specifically referenced the very IP address of the Ethiopian government server responsible for the command and control of the spyware on Mr. Kidane’s laptop.

We strenuously disagree with the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in this case. Foreign governments should not be immune from suit for injuring Americans in their own homes and Americans should be as safe from remote controlled, malware, or robot attacks as they are from human agents. The FSIA does not require the courts to close their doors to Americans who are attacked, and the court’s strained reading of the law is just wrong. Worse still, according to the court, so long as the foreign government formed even the smallest bit of its tortious intent abroad, it’s immune from suit. We are evaluating our options for challenging this ruling. (For more from the author of “D.C. Circuit Court Issues Dangerous Decision for Cybersecurity: Ethiopia Is Free to Spy on Americans in Their Own Homes” please click HERE)

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Two High-Level Government Child Trafficking Rings Busted and American Media Is Silent

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In late 2016, the government’s spin machine made it a point to feature “pizza gate,” only to mock anyone who would ever believe it to be true. The thought that high-level government officials in the U.S. would or could ever be involved in sex-trafficking or pedophilia was presented as far-fetched conspiracy theory, only believed by the fringe elements of society. But as The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, pedophilia involving high-level government officials is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

In the North Bengal region of India, a child welfare officer, India’s equivalent of a Child Protective Services official was arrested for her role in a child-trafficking ring. Sasmita Ghosh’s arrest makes the seventh as of late. The State’s Criminal Investigative Department (CID) made the arrests. According to The Hindu, “The CID had unearthed the child trafficking racket during raids at homes and nursing homes in Baduria area of North 24 Parganas district, in Behala in the southern fringes of Kolkata and some other parts of south Bengal in November last year.”

Abortion clinics in the area were convincing mothers to give birth to their children in exchange for money ranging between $1,400 and $4,500 USD. Other birthing centers told mothers their children were stillborn, when they weren’t, allowing the clinic to steal the babies for sale on the black market. The children were transported in bread baskets to nursing homes in the area where they would remain until they were sold into servitude, as sex slaves, or brothels.

“It is a huge network of NGOs, nursing homes, doctors and middlemen dealing in illegal adoption and baby trafficking that the police have busted. Our men are now building on the huge leads they have already got in this case,” Rajesh Kumar, CID’s Additional Director General told the press. Additionally, investigators believe foreigners were buying the children. Currency from other countries was found at the same time the children were discovered. Several corpses and skeletons of infants were also unearthed in the raided businesses.

Child trafficking is on the rise in the U.S. In 2006, a woman living in North Carolina, Mercedes Farquharson, fled the country when it was discovered she’d been using two young girls as house slaves, forced to farm the land, and do all the household chores, along with cooking and cleaning. In 2009, she was arrested in Bulgaria, where she’d fled to escape justice.

The trafficking of children isn’t limited to lowly child-protective service workers either. Hama Amadou, an opposition leader in the Sahel state of Niger was sentenced to one year in prison for providing babies to Niger’s elite society. “Prosecutors claim that Amadou was one of a group of people accused of smuggling babies from Nigeria via Benin to wealthy couples in Niger by falsely claiming the parenthood of around 30 children,” according to Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international newsgroup. Childlessness is Niger is looked down upon, so one way the elitists solved their own infertility problem was to take someone else’s child as their own.

DW described what happened after they acquired a child, “At the turn of the last decade, Niger’s elite went through a baby boom. Women who had been childless for years were suddenly celebrating the birth of their first child.” The miraculous blessings of motherhood reportedly came at the expense of someone else’s presumably stolen, purchased, or seized baby. Amadou was tried in absentia and his lawyer says the allegations are politically motivated.

Closer to home, Child Protective Services, as TFTP has consistently reported, is authorized to kidnap children at will, and place those children in foster care homes. The government’s own agency charged with protecting children, routinely displaces babies, children, and adolescents away from their parents in order to supposedly protect those children.

Many of those same CPS workers are abusers as well, who sometimes place those kidnapped children in the homes of sexual predators, where they are routinely victimized. The terrorist organization evokes fear in the hearts of so many parents. The power CPS possesses is legally unmatched in all of society. If you’d like to peruse our archives of CPS articles, you can do so by clicking here. Children are being ripped from their parents for something as innocent and well-intentioned as homeschooling.

If child trafficking arrests of government officials can happen around the world, why is it so far-fetched to think it cannot and does not happen here in the U.S.? The reality of the situation is that it is not at all far-fetched and even admitted. But the American spin machine is able to make anyone who talks about it look like a crazy person. The problem is getting so large, however, these sickos are having a hard time keeping it under wraps. As the Free Thought Project previously reported, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney says if they government actually investigated it, child trafficking would destroy both Democrats and Republicans. (For more from the author of “Two High-Level Government Child Trafficking Rings Busted and American Media Is Silent” please click HERE)

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Trump Says He Will Submit Evidence of Wiretapping to House Committee ‘Very Soon’

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President Trump discussed his tweeted accusation that President Obama ordered “wires” at Trump Tower tapped during last year’s presidential campaign in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Wednesday.

Trump told host Tucker Carlson that the administration “will be submitting things” to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “very soon.” The president added that he “will be, perhaps speaking about this next week” and predicted that “you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next 2 weeks.”

When asked by Carlson why he tweeted about the alleged phone tap before producing evidence, Trump said his definition of wiretapping “covers a lot of different things.”

“That really covers surveillance and many other things. Nobody ever talks about the fact that [the words ‘wires tapped’] was in quotes [in the tweet], but that’s a very important thing.”

Trump defended his ongoing use of social media while in office, saying that “maybe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter, because I get such a fake press, such a dishonest press. (Read more from “Trump Says He Will Submit Evidence of Wiretapping to House Committee ‘Very Soon'” HERE)

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Hawaii Sues Trump Admin for Discrimination … but Have They Checked the Mirror?

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Nate Madden of Conservative Review has outlined the problems with the latest lawsuit filed by Hawaii against President Donald Trump’s revised immigration order temporarily suspending entry from six terrorist safe havens. (Arguments are being held today in federal court.) But watching the attorney general of Hawaii, Doug Chin, condemn President Donald Trump’s revised immigration order as “blatantly discriminatory” was quite ironic, given that Hawaii is the home of a state government that constantly engages in blatant racial and ethnic discrimination.

Contrary to Chin’s outrageous claim, Trump’s new order does not discriminate against anyone, whether based on race or religion. Although Chin accused the administration of issuing an order designed to divide people into “a superior race,” it is Hawaii that blatantly discriminates to divide Hawaiian residents and create a “superior race” of Hawaiians entitled to special loans, low cost housing, and other privileges.

The state government has a special “Office of Hawaiian Affairs” (OHA). As its own website says, the OHA awards scholarship money to “Native Hawaiians,” as well as loans to “start businesses, improve homes, consolidate debts, and continue their education.” It also gives out grants and leases out land at very special, low rates to “Native Hawaiians.” To qualify, you have to prove you are a “descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778” according to the Hawaiian Home Commission Act. As Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says, this is no different than the “odious ‘one drop rule’ contained in the racial-segregation codes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

In a highly critical 2005 report on the proposed Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, the Civil Rights Commission said that Hawaii “is in a league by itself” when it comes to officially sanctioned discriminatory conduct. Hawaii has some nerve claiming that the revised executive order “differentiates between people based on their … national origin.” That is something the Hawaiian government does every day — differentiate between people based on their origin and whether they can trace their bloodlines back to 1778.

Attorney General Doug Chin should put his own house in order before he starts accusing President Trump of discrimination. He would be better off suing his own state government to stop its flagrant discrimination and its division of Hawaiian residents into two separate classes, one of which is given special privileges not available to anyone else. (For more from the author of “Hawaii Sues Trump Admin for Discrimination … but Have They Checked the Mirror?” please click HERE)

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6 Unsettling Ways Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Headed Toward Disaster

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As conservatives fight the efforts of their own party and president to promote Obamacare 2.0 here at home, there are some major problems with the direction in foreign policy of this Trump administration. We can dismiss all reports of liberal policies and leftist personnel emanating from this administration as “fake news” — or we can demand a course correction before this becomes the third term of Obama’s State Department. The choice is ours.

The final dramatic act of the Obama administration was to instigate a public feud between former Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over where Jews can live in their own homeland. As conservatives, we swore to ourselves that once Trump assumed power we’d be done with the illogical and immoral Oslo Accords, along with its maniacal idea of creating a new Arab terror state.

Trump himself also promised a new direction:

The reason this issue is important is not just because of our relationship with Israel ; it’s that the obsession with a Palestinian state and the recognition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists has served as the fulcrum of our entire Middle East policy for 24 years, preventing us from acting in our own self-interests.

The failure to understand the danger of the PLO is not just bad for Israel. It’s also dangerous for America because it demonstrates that our political elites don’t understand the Islamic threat and will continue the past mistakes of both the Clinton/Obama leftists and the establishment neo-conservatives who support the nation building agenda in the Arab world.

Well, that nightmare is now upon us.

During Trump’s second week in office, I took a lot of flak for criticizing the White House’s statement on Israel’s construction in the so-called settlements. Some conservatives felt that Trump’s statement was a breath of fresh air because, while he did rebuke the construction, he implied that building within the “settlement blocks” is OK.

Obviously, as I noted at the time, this statement is nonsense. Why are we getting involved in any of this Kerry-style dictating of terms? Weren’t we supposed to break from the entire Oslo Accords? Why should we legitimize any notion of a Palestinian state and how does that put America’s interests first? Weren’t we done with nation building in terror states among existing nations, much less trying to create a new one? I warned that absent a course correction, this policy would grow legs and irrevocably suck the president into the globalist swamp of the PLO cause.

It has. Consider the following troubling observations:

This week, Trump dispatched Jason Greenblatt, his top lawyer and envoy to the Middle East, to pressure Netanyahu into halting construction, even for a city designed to house displaced Israelis who were uprooted by a very painful evacuation. As the Times of Israel is reporting, Greenblatt is now obsessing over every last neighborhood with the maniacal precision of John Kerry to prevent Israel from building even within existing “settlements.” The pressure is reportedly so strong that Netanyahu has now held off on his plans to fully annex Ma’ale Adumim, the largest suburb of Jerusalem, which has always been a “consensus” area (even to those who buy into the premise of a Palestinian state). Greenblatt later met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (whose term of office expired eight years ago!) and treated him like a peace partner.

The inimitable Caroline Glick gives a riveting account of the sharp turn of the White House on Israel — embracing the PLO, inviting Abbas to the White House, and taking an active (almost obsessive) role in promoting a Palestinian state. It’s almost as if Trump has made it his life’s mission (or, son-in-law Jared Kushner’s mission) to ram through the “peace process” even more than Obama.

My colleague, Jordan Schachtel has already reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appointed a Kerry acolyte as the Israel-Palestinian policy official in the State Department. Michael Ratney was Obama’s consul to Jerusalem who “oversaw grants to OneVoice, a leftist non-profit that President Obama allegedly used to try to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 2015 election.” Ratney oversaw a program the Times of Israel said was “in effect setting up an armed Palestinian militia in the consulate.” Martin Indyk — Obama’s anti-Israel apologist — praised the appointment, tweeting that Ratney was a “valued member of Kerry’s peace team.”

Trump decided to keep Obama’s National Security Council Adviser, Yael Lempert, for Israel policy. She accompanied Greenblatt on his trip to Israel, where he graciously met with Abbas and pressured Netanyahu on settlements. Lempert was literally Obama’s point person in the White House orchestrating his war against Israel. This decision is Orwellian.

Talk about the fox guarding the hen house? Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, the Iran director for Obama’s National Security Council, has been given the portfolio over the Persian Gulf region on the policy planning staff at the State Department. This individual was an essential figure in pushing through the Iran deal and has ties to Tehran.

Defense Secretary James Mattis wanted to appoint Anne Patterson to the No. 3 position in the Pentagon. Patterson was Obama’s ambassador to Egypt, who had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and embodied John Kerry’s foreign policy. Although conservatives successfully prevented that from happening, Mattis’ motivations, along with a number of troubling statements on policy, reveal that he fundamentally doesn’t share a conservative worldview.

Folks, this is not “deep state” sabotage of Pres. Trump’s agenda. This is Trump sabotaging himself by allowing Jared in the White House and top officials in State to promote the very worst elements of the Clinton/Bush/Obama foreign policy. And it’s not just about Israel. Anyone who believes in creating a new terror state and partnering with PLO terrorists clearly does not understand the broader Islamic threat. This could lead us into nation-building in Syria and other insufferable Arab countries, a notion Trump explicitly rejected with his popular denunciation of the Iraq war.

There is nothing to “negotiate” and nobody with which we can “cut deals.” This is not a matter of convincing Carrier to keep its plant in Indiana. Some things don’t work with negotiations; Islamo-fascists elements are one good example.

What is so disappointing is that foreign policy is the one area where the president has wide latitude to change course without the cumbersome legislative process. Almost 60 days into the new administration, there is no major accomplishment that has gotten past Congress, including the much-promised FULL repeal of Obamacare. Again, foreign policy is the one area where Donald Trump can unilaterally make his mark.

However, absent a dramatic change of course, the pink unicorn of the PLO “peace process” will ensnare President Trump into untenable diplomatic quicksand. As Caroline Glick warns, “The PLO is the Siren that drowns U.S. administrations.” Trump must understand that if he is “serious about embracing the PLO and intends to have his top advisers devote themselves to Abbas and his henchmen,” he is setting himself up “to fail and be humiliated.”

Make no mistake: The “two-state solution” is the Obamacare of foreign policy. Failure to repeal it will be as catastrophic for foreign policy as Obamacare is for domestic policy. Except this time, we won’t be able to blame a parliamentarian. (For more from the author of “6 Unsettling Ways Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Headed Toward Disaster” please click HERE)

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